Iron meteorites,?

Question

Have any of them ever ben forged into tools?

Answer 1

Yes.  An large iron meteor was a main source of metal for Eskimos for years.  It became sort of a ritual to go to the meteor site and work pieces of it into knives and points.

A large piece called the Ahnighito meteor (one of three main pieces) was eventually moved to the Haydn planetarium in NYC.  

In other areas meteors were used also, especially in western Africa.  There the meteor exploded leaving lots of smaller easier to work fragments on surface.

Answer 2

Definitely.  There is very little pure metallic iron in the earth's crust.  Most of it is in the form of oxides, which have to be smelted to remove the oxygen and concentrate the metal.  Before people figured how to smelt iron from these ores, they used iron from meteorites because it was already smelted into big blobs of fairly pure iron metal, which could be heated and hammered into tools or decorative objects.

Answer 3

I have read in the past that it was iron meteorites that most likely were used by ancient man first as a source of iron to begin the iron age.